Inky Horizons
by Tsukiko Lily
Summary: Life's no day at the beach. Russell/Sabrina. Some melancholy fluff to brighten your day?


**Authors Note:** Wow, I'm really on a roll! O_O Anyway, this is just something I've had swimming around in my head for a while. Not much to it other than playing a bit with a pairing I've grown rather fond of. I haven't seen anything for them before, so I figured I'd be the one to do it. ^^; (If there is something else, please direct me there!)

**Warnings:** Suggestive themes, but not graphic.

**Obligatory Disclaimer:** I still own nothing. T_T *Poor as a churchmouse*

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**Inky Horizons**

Lying on his back, a blanket separating his body from the sand, turned upwards towards the vast sky, grey and splotchy like runny ink, like the book full of little notes he had taken that had gotten left out in the rain when he was a child. _Why do I remember that? So many things happened that were actually, objectively terrible since then, but I can still see that ruined book, and how I stared at the wrinkled unreadable paper and cried over it._ His face didn't show it (nor indeed, did it show much of anything at this point in time), but he was brimming over with a sort of vague anxiety. For one thing, he wasn't wearing his usual heavy overshirt, which typically only parted with his body during bathing and sleep. Stripped down to the pale tan short-sleeved shirt he wore under it, he felt strangely light, almost ungrounded in space, unsure of what to do with his body. So he kept his arms draped over his chest, exposed to cool air to which they had become unaccustomed. _Cold._ Not that the cold was the issue, at least for him. The beach was empty on days like this, but it was always these days when he made a point of coming. He loved the moody grey sky, with its shifting patterns of light and dark, the way the ocean turned a dark grey-green under the flat dull light, a light where he cast no shadow. He loved the way the wind brought the cool, moist, salty air off the ocean, and how new this air seemed, so new it could almost sting his eyes. He loved the way the mottled sky and dark water seemed to stretch on forever towards the horizon.

Russell lived for days like this.

So why, then, couldn't he settle down? It could have been that same strange, weightless, almost self-conscious feeling that had been bothering several minutes ago. Or actually, it probably couldn't, because he decided that it would be silly to pine away for his stupid coat when he _could_ be enjoying the perfectly lovely air. _That's usually why you come here, so why complain about an excess of it? Your thinking never makes any sense, you…_ He decided he was exactly right. His thinking _didn't_ make any sense. If it did, he wouldn't be trying not to look at the dark-haired woman sprawled on the blanket next to him. Especially not while exerting a sort of sick, painful effort to maintain his awareness of her occupying the same space as him. _Just listen for her breathing. Feel the way the sand moves under you when she stirs. Or just know it intellectually, you're good with facts, right?_ You see, he had it in his head that if he turned to look at her, the dream would break and it would all go away. _It's just like that one dream, the one where you follow the sound with your eyes, the arrow races for your head, and you jerk awake in your sweaty sheets yet again._ He didn't want to wake up. Not after what happened last night, anyway.

It wasn't the kind of thing that happened to someone like him. And it still didn't feel quite real. Those sweaty, breathless hours, held fast together at the hips, occasionally catching a glimpse of their candlelit shadows on the walls, like strange naked ghosts performing behind a thin curtain, perhaps the very one separating the obscene and the sublime. Then, as now, he felt that the youthful shadow cast on that wall belonged to someone else, a stranger trying his body on for size. Everything went blurry, her hot breath fogging his crooked glasses. Somewhere behind the pale wall of dewy glass, the pair return, exhausted, to their separate bodies.

_These things don't happen to people like me._

He truly believed that. He, after all, wasn't a particularly attractive person. A pale bookworm with poor motor skills who was raising a child on his own and who, possibly, may or may not wake up screaming now and then. He was damaged. He was boring. He drank too much and didn't say the right things at the right times. He couldn't even tell when others were saying the right things at the right times, just staring ahead or blindly laughing along as everything flew right past his head. Sure, he'd managed a few adventures in his youth, a few encounters here and there with a plain but cute enough girl. They'd do it in the library after hours when they were technically being paid to organize books. _Of course, she's probably a war casualty now, like everyone else. Even those who did survive usually wish they didn't… At least some of the time, or actually, most of the time, if we're talking about a few years ago…_ Russell shook his head in a futile attempt to empty it out, then turned to face Sabrina's restful form. _See, you're not waking up. It's not like that dream where you stab that poor bastard, make eye contact, notice that your skin has started sliding off your bones, scream, wake up on the floor beside the bed, and stare out the window until the sun comes up. She's real. She's _real_. It's ok._

In the beginning, they both just liked to drink and disliked being alone. And they liked to talk. At first about amusing experiences with customers or the foolishness of their inebriated neighbors (if nothing else, bars made good people-watching), or possibly the antics of their children, later about war and divorce. They decided it might be fun to drink together at her house, to sit huddled together on the floor instead of in their separate chairs, to kiss and hold hands, everything escalating towards the events of the previous night. Neither of them expected it to last. Sabrina, after all, still obviously felt for her former spouse, and made no pretenses about this. They were just tiding one another over, until, their loneliness eased, they would part ways at some indeterminate point in time. Which was just fine by him. He, after all, wasn't the kind of person anyone really wants to spend their life with. After this span of minutes, Sabrina must have felt his eyes on her, because she turned to meet them, a slight smirk on her lips. Russell's face didn't change from its typical state, a sort of flat curiosity, but just beneath, his whole being turned over on itself. _So beautiful I could die right here. Do you know what you're doing to me?_ Instead of speaking his mind, he tried smiling. She turned to the side and laughed before allowing her eyes to reconnect with his.

_What force would drag someone like you towards someone like me?_

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Every day they were together, Sabrina found so much to like about Russell. The way that he, in moments like this, constantly readjusted his glasses, as though he were constantly trying to get a better look at her and the entire world. As though, each time he tugged the frames back to their proper place on the bridge of his nose, he gained some new perspective. _You'd like that, wouldn't you? Always searching for a new vantage point from which to search for something none of us can see, something hiding in the back of your mind or in your endless stream of books._ She loved the way the world seemed to unfold when she was around him, every rock, every leaf, every insect and constellation would send him on a good-natured ramble, a glimpse in to his world of endless facts. She loved they way the disorder of his bedroom contrasted with his organized collections of things, stones and feathers he found on walks and ferried home in his pockets. _You're still a child, aren't you?_ And, as it started to become clear to her, she came to love him because he had a comical, nerdy chivalry about him, the same quality she had noticed in Neumann when they started going together all those years ago. She remembered the surprise and vague horror she felt, watching as this unassuming, bookish man going in to overdrive to get her things inside, covered, or tied down during a gusty summer storm, soaking wet, hurried, and cursing through his teeth. _You almost caught your death out there, too. Just like I told you. Or rather, yelled at you from the doorway, wind nearly blowing the door from my hands._ Was it any wonder she found herself careening towards him?

And careen she did. She never imagined that she'd fall so hard for her drinking buddy, her Mr.-Right-Now. But how couldn't she? He was the only one who would share the beach with her on cloudy days. Even their children were always together. So it shouldn't have come as a surprise that last night, they found their clothes falling away from their bodies, his far more reluctantly than hers. _I've never been comfortable with clothing. I spent my childhood playing nearly nude in the woods, my adolescence skinny-dipping, and my summer nights to this day stripping naked in the moonlight while the village sleeps, my skin greeting the water like an old friend._ She always got the sense that, while she was strongly physical, Russell was almost purely cerebral. This was her chance to invite him in, just as he had with his tangents, his leafing through books to answer her questions. _Welcome to _my_ world. As your mind cries out for your books, my body screams for running, swimming, sex. As you long to hover over the world like an ever-watchful sky, I long to cling to it and flow through its crevices, like water. We'll meet at the horizon._

Needless to say, he enjoyed his round-trip tour of her world. But she got the sense that it had stunned him in to a sort of uneasy quietness. He was a contemplator, that she knew well. She even knew that his introspection could turn dark, seen him in his shrieking post-nightmare states, seen him plastered and jabbering, slurring run-on sentences about how he's killed people before, how he narrowly avoided that fate himself. But this wasn't like that. This was just typical Russell over-thinking, shot through with a twinge of shyness. _They broke the mold when they made you._

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"Russell, something bothering you?"

"Um, no, I…"

"…_Russell_?"

She tilted one eyebrow upwards. His face flushed as he sat up to nervously stare at the sand.

"Well… Last night was nice and all, but… _Really_? I mean, it's kind of hard to believe that…"

"Russell, it's not like we could have had the same dream, you know."

"No, I suppose not."

Sabrina stared directly in to his eyes, her expression suggesting a youthful but sultry mischievousness.

"…We could go prove it, if you want."

Russell swallowed hard, heat radiating through his skin, unable to recall ever feeling so much blood pumping in to his face. He gazed at Sabrina for a moment, taking in her cropped hair, her amber eyes, her tanned and delicately sun-kissed skin, the way she looked at him, so dangerous and inviting. Without a word, he snatched up the bottle of wine they had nearly finished some hours ago, and bolted down its remaining contents. It was quite possibly the most wonderful offer anyone had ever made, but he felt the need to fortify himself as much as he could. He wiped away a trail of red that formed at the corner of his mouth with his forearm and cleared his throat.

"…Alright."

Sabrina smiled and dashed on to her porch, where she stood, waiting. As Russell eased himself up on one knee, he stared at her, looking so small and far away under the huge mottled sky. He felt like a character in a ruined notebook, part of some beautiful story long ago obscured and washed away.


End file.
